Most of the people heaping praise on Lance Armstrong these past two weeks couldn’t care less about cycling or the Tour de France. They know a remarkable athletic feat when they see it and they see an American accomplishing it in a hostile environment. And it’s easy to root for a cancer survivor who not only returned to his sport after beating the disease but became even more dominant.

Fair enough. I’m all for protecting our own. I’m just not comfortable heaping praise upon Armstrong, and it’s not because his girlfriend Sheryl did irreparable harm to my eardrums in that Kid Rock duet.

Many Europeans, and the French especially, have an irrational loathing for the now six-time Tour winner. Part of it, no doubt, is human nature, the same reason many (right-thinking) folks here in the States dislike the Yankees and Jeff Gordon – they just win too much.

Part of it also is that American has dominated their prestigious race for more than half a decade and makes no apologies for the fact that he’s done it, which rubs some Europeans the wrong way.

Some of press across the pond reflects this in its coverage of Armstrong, which seems entirely bent on tearing him down with drug allegations and other personal attacks.

Even though Lance is usually genuinely gracious when he wins, the press and spectators take delight in spitting on him, literally and figuratively. Perhaps it’s because he’s from Texas, like our reviled President. Maybe if Armstrong just apologized for the Bush administration and put on an “aw shucks” act whenever he won a stage, the press over there wouldn’t break into his hotel room and old ladies wouldn’t throw their hand bags at him.

It’s not just the snooty Europeans who resent Armstrong. Greg LeMond, once the greatest American cyclist ever, now a bitter old pedal-pusher, has joined segments of the press in accusing his successor of going to the medicine cabinet for assistance.

The jealousy was quite apparent in Lemond’s statements to the French press, which is understandable, given how Armstrong has made most Americans forget about LeMond, even though he helped put cycling on the map here. Armstrong even upstaged LeMond, who once returned from a near-fatal hunting accident to win the Tour, in the CBS Movie of the Week department with his comeback from cancer.

But the French and LeMond are also intensely proud and protective of their sport, which already has had to deal with a messy drug scandal in 1998 involving an oxygen-to-blood booster called EPO. They follow the sport much more closely than I and most other Americans do, and I doubt they’d be so willing to tear down the its biggest name if they didn’t sense that something just wasn’t quite kosher.

You’ve no doubt heard about the charges of doping that have been swirling around Armstrong ever since he began his championship run in 1999. To this point, it’s all been based on circumstantial evidence and hearsay, but given the way evidence of drug use is piling up against athletes is every sport, the charges against Armstrong are hard to ignore.

The latest allegations were outlined in a recently released book that chased Armstrong through Belgium and France during this year’s race. In the book, one of Armstrong’s former assistants claims that she used to give him makeup to hide arm bruises caused by needle injections, but never actually saw him injecting drugs. The same assistant claims Armstrong asked her to dispose of a bag of empty syringes a year earlier.

Yet the weight of the evidence continues to be on Armstrong’s side. He has taken about two dozen drug tests this year and has always been negative. He was also cleared in by an official French investigation that began three years ago.

Something keeps gnawing at me whenever I’m poised to jump on the Lance bandwagon though. Admittedly, it’s not based on his performance, because you could fit what I know about bike racing in a specimen bottle. Maybe he’s just that much better than everyone else.

The thing is, I have similar doubts about Barry Bonds, and so does much of the American public. We look at the way Bonds’ body changed over the years, how his power numbers skyrocketed after his 30th birthday and hear all of the leaks coming out of the BALCO case and conclude that there is something unnatural about the way he has become one of the most dominating hitters ever in what should be the sunset of his career.

Like all Major League players, Bonds has been tested for steroids, but baseball has never released individual results, so the hard evidence against him is virtually non-existent, just as it is with Armstrong.

And yet Armstrong for the most part gets a free pass from the folks back home, while a cloud of suspicion follows Bonds wherever he goes. One is guilty in the court of public opinion, while the other isn’t even brought up on charges.

Ask me to put my money where my mouth is, and I’d reluctantly have to bet on Bonds being on the juice. Ask me to do the same regarding Armstrong, and I would have to open my wallet again.

I’d rather be wrong than a hypocrite.

Randy Whitehouse is a staff writer. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]